Friday, September 29, 2006

[Tools] Video blogging is easier than you think...

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no Orangette when it comes to writing a food blog. I have been preparing a post that involves cooking eggs, and I couldn't for the life of me put my technique into words. So I went and embedded a video into my post. I'd never done it before, and I was surprised how easy it was given a few important tools and web sites.

Here's what I've learned.

1. Take video - Most (if not all) digital cameras take small videos. Since this video is internet-bound, it doesn't have to be hollywood quality. Even a 640x480 video is overkill for embedding into a post. It helps tremendously if you use a tripod or some other stable base to film. This will avoid the dreaded "home movie shakes".

2. Edit video - All Windows XP machines should have Windows Movie Editor. This is an excellent program for beginners. There are a host of fancy transition and editing functions in this free program. This is important to me, since my camera only takes 30 second videos and the video I needed was 45 seconds long. WME allowed me to trim excess video off each clip and splice them together. If you don't have this on your WinXP machine, you can get it by upgrading (for free) to service pack 2.

3. Create a YouTube account -YouTube allows you to post videos for free, and it has html code for embedding the video in your post.

4. Upload the video - YouTube has easy to follow instructions for this.

5. Embed in your post - I use blogger, which had a cow with the HTML code. Don't worry, it's fine. Just check "Stop showing HTML errors for this post" and save as draft or publish. The video won't appear in your composer, but it'll pop up on the preview.

I may be a late one on this. But my wife and I did this not long ago using stills and iMovie on a mac. On our first venture into semi-moving pictures (given ours was just a slide show with movies) it took us about 60-90 min to produce about a 1 min short complete with text and movies. It really is very simple and the feed back I got from it was really positive.

I also discovered my blog got clicks back from the YouTube people. Go figure on that front.

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